What Would the Earth Look Like if it Stopped Spinning?

The article doesn't give many details, but it sounds like Fraczek assumed that, other than the oceans, the Earth is a completely rigid body. It's not, only the Earth's crust is (mostly) rigid. The mantle and core are fluid, so the Earth would also react to the decrease in 'centrifugal' force and become more round. I don't think his final model of the Earth really describes what would happen.

Not to mention what would happen to the Earth's magnetic field.

Yea, that doesn't seem to cover much. Like would only one side of the planet face the sun? or would a day last 365 normal days?

If only one side faced the sun, it would be covered in deserts, and the only habitable areas would be a ring at the edges of the sun-side where it wasn't intense enough for desert but not so weak as to have ice. The really bad part would be the dark side would accumulate most of the water as the weather deposited it as snow and ice.

A bleak outlook if you ask me.

Drew

A bit like the planet Mercury, only larger.

Overtime wouldn't the planet's core cool and the electromagnetic poles weaken or die, solar radiation anyone? Would also think that something will happen to the atmosphere, then the water. (Mars 2?)

Not a plausible scenario for the Earth to completely stop spinning, given the energy needed to overcome the conservation of angular momentum of the Earth's rotation.

What the article also doesn't mention is the oceans at the equator are 17 km deeper than they would be if the Earth were stationary. Mt. Everest is only just over 8 km above "sea level" (if there is such a thing when the seas will lower at the equator and rise at the poles over time)

What will happen is the rotation of the Earth slows because of the tidally-induced position of the Earth-Moon system. In a couple of billion years, the friction caused by tides will have slowed the Earth's rotation and caused the Moon to move out in its orbit to maintain the same angular momentum. This is estimated to result in a day that is 35-38 "current days" long with the same face of the Moon and Earth always facing each other. The Moon has already chosen which face it will permamently display towards the Earth.

When this happens, the map of the Earth would be very similar to this one, but somewhere on Earth there would be a slight tidal bulge facing the moon and an equal one on the exact opposite side, but there would not be lunar "tides" as the bulge would not move. It would only be a few centimetres high though, given so not a huge change from the map shown here.

Does anyone know what happens after that? There would still be solar tides. These would slow the Earth/Moon rotation. But how would the Earth/Moon system respond?

If the earth stopped spinning, all the plate tectonics (presently Causing earthquakes and shrinkage of the earth) will reverse (Unwind) and result in total fragmentation. This in turn will stop containment of the fluid magma, flinging it into space. All the same, these disintegrated stuff will continue to orbit the sun with individual spins, clockwise or ant-clockwise or even end-over-end.the atmosphere will cling to different pieces and whatever life forms survived the cataclysmic events, would continue to be supported as individual ecosystems for several billion years thereafter!!

never mind the oceans pulling back to the poles. it'll be worse.

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